In writing up my year’s summary. I am thinking about how I sat with the photograph, for a year. I knew it related to the site of making as much as the desk, but I didn’t begin to engage with the photograph in a fully embodied way, that is I didn’t engage with the objects in the space until I moved out of the studio. Questions I need to ask myself are why did it take moving from the studio, being engaged with the table, throwing it out, to think of making an object? How do I read the photograph? How do I engage with it? Is the answer in the word read? How does it differ from the way I work with objects? I did work with the photograph as an object. Why did I not want to re-create the table, or use it to make an installation when I was looking at the photograph? It took losing the table to stimulate a translation of the table, a recreation, trying to bring something back. Loss of the table. I used the chest of drawers and didn’t mind throwing them out? I didn’t have the same emotional reaction. It was an intense feeling of loss. Literally going through five stages of grief over a table. Because I thought it was the only possibility. What was lost when I threw out the table, when I moved studios? What is lost in the photograph?
Building the thesis over the next few months will give me the opportunity to go back to this. The photograph, Blank Canvas and photographed marks, drawn marks will be explored further in this context. There is a change of direction from the table to the book. Now I can return to the photograph with the knowledge gained from working with the objects. This order of working (photo—object—photo) may be important in how elements of interaction (questions, concerns, resolutions) develop further.
There may be a reason why this path was chosen i.e why I went from photo back to photo.
Also, this back and forth rhythm, leaving and returning is visible more, a(s in running post). Leaving, or going back and forth, seems integral to problem solving in some way.
The loss of the body? What part of the self is lost in each medium? What is visible? Painting is most connected? ????
*Also, explore standardisation of variables as a way of validating subjective information (scientific) limiting or controlling ‘interference’, statistically valid, as science is.
**The marks on the table were marks I considered to be of low value, i.e they were not in any paintings, but on the outside, left over. They were given value through the loss of the table. The traces or accumulation of presence over the past years of working. Text, within the context of the thesis could this be considered in a similar way? Text (as material?) is not seen as of value, the behind the scenes stuff from making a painting, the expanded field of my practice. I am now defining painting and exploring this expanded, contextual material. Explore.
Blank Canvas 